Turkey Pandemonium

One of the things that went by the wayside during 2020 was our big Thanksgiving Dinner.

On Thanksgiving we make turkey, ham, gravy, two kinds of stuffing, mashed potatoes, cooked and raw vegetables, pickles, olives, that green bean casserole thing with the crispy onions on top (which is the highest calorie item on the menu), and those other things that fill in the empty spots on your plate. And the pie. Apple, Cherry, Minced Meat, Pumpkin, Pecan. Real Pecan with pecans filling the whole pie, not just some pecan crumbs resting on top of a sea of glaze.

I cook any other day of the year but not Thanksgiving, so I clean all the dishes, pots, and pans afterwards, while everyone else settles down to play Hand and Foot, a card game I can’t make heads nor tails of. Instead I watch football on the kitchen TV. We’ve had twenty-five or thirty, and some years more than fifty people over for the holiday.

It’s Pandemonium.

Last year that was out of the question. We bought our Thanksgiving turkey, but with a holiday surge in the pandemic getting together was out of the question, so our celebration was limited to the three of us, me, my spouse Jennie, and our daughter who moved in a month before the pandemic began. We decided to keep the turkey in the freezer and stick to essentials – a turkey breast, stuffing, mashed potatoes, and two kinds of pie, pumpkin and pecan.

So there was no Pandemonium during the Pandemic, which caused me to turn to the twenty volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary to find out where those two words came from

It turns out there’s something very democratic about the word “pandemic,” involving two Greek words – pan, which means “all,” and demos which means “people.” We get democracy from demos, government by the people, which by the way, was considered an evil before our Revolution because the people were not to be trusted – and they weren’t, by kings. And of course pan means all because you bake a pie in a pan and all people like pie.

Pandemonium sounds like pandemic, but they don’t mean the same thing. Oh, “pan” still means “all,” but the word pandemonium was invented by the poet John Milton for his epic poem “Paradise Lost.” In the poem Lucifer and all the demons get tossed out of heaven and are plunged into the infernal regions. Pandemonium, which means “All Demons,” is the name of the capital city of Hell.

The word became very popular and along the way lost its associations with the Prince of Darkness. The Oxford English Dictionary, which uses examples from every century to show how a word was used, gave this example from 1885: “When night fell, it brought with it a pandemonium of dancing and whooping, drumming and feasting.”

Sounds less like hell and more like

Thanksgiving.

Oddly enough the word demon comes from the Greek “daemon” which doesn’t refer to demons, but to spirits that are neither good nor evil, mischief-making creatures that are always underfoot. Kind of like kids while you’re trying to cook Thanksgiving Dinner.

Well, come Easter this year the three of us decided to defrost the Thanksgiving turkey and serve it complete with stuffing, mashed potatoes and gravy, asparagus, and a low-calorie pie, in recognition of all the pandemic weight we’re trying to take off. And that’s another aspect of the pandemic that was democratic because it affected all the people – putting on weight in 2020 and taking it off in 2021! Frank Ramirez is the Senior Pastor of the Union Center Church of the Brethren.